How the Democrats Can Keep the Momentum Going

There's an easy way to avoid screwing this all up, writes Drew Magary.

Democrats won huge last night in regional elections across the country—most notably in my neighboring state of Virginny—and I promise I’m not here to place myself in charge of turding up the punch bowl like I normally do. These are truly wonderful victories, from the first transgender candidate ever elected to a statehouse, to the vanquishing of vile Republican operative and peanut enthusiast Ed Gillespie, to Ravinder Bhalla triumphing in New Jersey despite a blatantly racist smear campaign against him. Filthy liberals like me hope these results all serve as an opening salvo to even greater victories in 2018, and perhaps even in 2020, assuming we’re all still alive and Donald Trump is still in the White House sending operatives out for Big Macs in the dead of night.

But for that to happen, Democrats have to keep doing things right, and this is a party known for handling success about as well as Boston sports fans. The joy I feel knowing that the tide turned just a little last night is tempered by the fact that Democratic honchos might potentially respond to their good fortune by IMMEDIATELY hosting a series of fundraisers in Bridgehampton and then spending all that money trying to woo bingo parlor racists in Steel Country. There’s no better recipe for instant failure.

So my hope is that whatever focus group mavens the Democrats are overpaying to do a postmortem on last night take a look—a real, strong look—at dudes like Democratic Socialist Lee Carter, who pulled a huge upset over the State majority whip in Virginia despite getting NO help from the party itself. I hope they look at the first item on Carter’s issue page, which was Medicaid expansion. I hope they look at Maine, where a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid won by nearly 20 points. And I hope they look at Ralph Northam’s gubernatorial win in Virginia, where nearly 40 percent of voters said health care was their top issue, and that they favored Northam because of that.

Frankly, Northam is lucky he won. Because even with that single-issue advantage in his back pocket, he didn’t exploit it fully. Instead, he ran your typical weenie centrist campaign where the candidate is like, “Let’s stop with the politics of division, folks! I’m gonna work WITH Donald Trump on the issues!” If he had been BOLDER, he could’ve beaten Gillespie by a thousand points, and [puts on fancy pundit hat] I’mma tell you how.

I worked in advertising for a decade and every assignment came with a strategic brief that laid out what the ad had to say. Based off that brief, we could usually tell if an ad was gonna fail even before we’d thought of anything. That’s because if a brief made us say EVERYTHING in an ad, we were fucked. You get seven words for a billboard. You get 60 seconds for a radio ad. You get 30 seconds for a TV, if you’re lucky. There isn’t enough time or space to say that your product does 97 different things. You get one thing. Try to push any more than that one thing, and you are fucked.

Politics, so reliant on advertising, is no different. One of the reason Democrats have a hard time bringing down Trump—who seems so EASY to destroy—is because he does so much awful shit on a daily basis that it’s hard to zero in on one single awful thing and hammer him on it. Trump himself, almost certainly by accident, was VERY good at choosing a message and beating it into the fucking ground until it was gospel. He had one shitty slogan (MAGA!), one shitty promise (A WALL!), and one shitty subtext for it all (RACISM!). If he angered the opposition in the process of delivering the message, all the better. Trump is a simple dope whose simplicity did him wonders on the campaign trail, enough to beat (CROOKED!) Hillary Clinton, who out of either optimism or foolishness, tried at all times to be all things to all people.

"Democrats are so afraid of alienating voters that they often forget to, you know, actually appeal to them."

You can’t do that. You get one thing. Wanna nail Trump? Just show him golfing. Again and again. Those jackass Trump voters Politico profiled this week? They all thought Barack Obama golfed more because they live in an alternate news dimension. Liberals like me take Trump’s lying, corruption, and sloth as a given. Other voters, lost in the fever grip of Breitbart, do not. You hammer Trump for one shitty thing, and then you promote the one thing you’re gonna do for voters that seems like a pretty nice deal (like free health care!).

Or better yet, don’t bother explicitly trying to win over butthole rural voters at all. Democrats are so afraid of alienating voters that they often forget to, you know, actually appeal to them. If there’s one thing Republicans are VERY good at, it’s creating single-issue voters amongst their base that keeps them going back to the polls every time. Trump can collude with Russia (allegedly) and pilfer tax funds (also allegedly) all he likes because single-issue rednecks only give a shit about guns, or abortion, or keeping Colin Kaepernick unemployed, or some other singular issue. Democrats need to cultivate their base similarly. I swear I’m not a BWHW guy, but the old man did a fine job hammering away at the same message over and over. Free health care. Free college. No more corporate bribery. He never deviated. He stayed on message. THAT is what got people enthused. Meanwhile, you got Senate Democrats sending out this kind of watered-down dreck:

Wanna fuck up everything good that happened last night? Do more of this, where you’re cramming empty pop culture references into a very tepid castigation of a DISASTROUS tax bill that needs to be depicted as such. You get one issue, Democrats. We're Americans, man. We don't do nuance well. You lead with one message, and I promise voters will follow you if you are confident in that message, instead of being a blind cipher forever taking the temperature of the room. Trump is damaged, Republicans are weakened, and Democrats have everything they need to land a death blow. Let’s see if they have the brains and courage to finally do it.